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begin, first of all, by expounding the passage from Goethe.
That which is for me through the medium of money — that for which I can pay (i.e.,
which money can buy) — that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the
power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my — the possessor’s
— properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means
determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of
women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness — its deterrent power — is
nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money
furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest,
unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the
supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of
being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real
brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy
clever people for himself, and is he who has a power over the clever not more clever than
the clever? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs
for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my
incapacities into their contrary?
If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me
with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all
ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation? It is the coin that really
separates as well as the real binding agent — the [. . .] chemical power of society.
Shakespeare stresses especially two properties of money:
1. It is the visible divinity — the transformation of all human and natural properties into
their contraries, the universal confounding and distorting of things: impossibilities are
soldered together by it.
2. It is the common whore, the common procurer of people and nations.
The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternisation of
impossibilities — the divine power of money — lies in its character as men’s estranged,
alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind.
That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my individual essential
powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of money. Money thus turns each of

these powers into something which in itself it is not — turns it, that is, into its contrary.
If I long for a particular dish or want to take the mail-coach because I am not strong
enough to go by foot, money fetches me the dish and the mail-coach: that is, it converts
my wishes from something in the realm of imagination, translates them from their
meditated, imagined or desired existence into their sensuous, actual existence — from
imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting this mediation,
[money] is the truly creative power.
No doubt the demand also exists for him who has no money, but his demand is a mere
thing of the imagination without effect or existence for me, for a third party, for the
[others], and which therefore remains even for me unreal and objectless. The difference
between effective demand based on money and ineffective demand based on my need,
my passion, my wish, etc., is the difference between being and thinking, between the idea
which merely exists within me and the idea which exists as a real object outside of me.
If I have no money for travel, I have no need — that is, no real and realisable need — to
travel. If I have the vocation for study but no money for it, I have no vocation for study
— that is, no effective, no true vocation. On the other hand, if I have really no vocation
for study but have the will and the money for it, I have an effective vocation for it. Money
as the external, universal medium and faculty (not springing from man as man or from
human society as society) for turning an image into reality and reality into a mere image,
transforms the real essential powers of man and nature into what are merely abstract
notions and therefore imperfections and tormenting chimeras, just as it transforms real
imperfections and chimeras — essential powers which are really impotent, which exist
only in the imagination of the individual — into real essential powers and faculties. In
the light of this characteristic alone, money is thus the general distorting of individualities
which turns them into their opposite and confers contradictory attributes upon their
attributes.
Money, then, appears as this distorting power both against the individual and against the
bonds of society, etc., which claim to be entities in themselves. It transforms fidelity into
infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into
master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy.

Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and confuses all
things, it is the general confounding and confusing of all things — the world upside-down
— the confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities.
He who can buy bravery is brave, though he be a coward. As money is not exchanged for
any one specific quality, for any one specific thing, or for any particular human essential
power, but for the entire objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its
possessor it therefore serves to exchange every quality for every other, even
contradictory, quality and object: it is the fraternisation of impossibilities. It makes
contradictions embrace.
Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can
exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an
artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you
must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of
your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the
object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return
— that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living
expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then
your love is impotent — a misfortune.


Preface and Table of Contents | Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General
Karl Marx Internet Archive
Karl Marx
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General
(6) This is perhaps the place at which, by way of explanation and justification, we might
offer some considerations in regard to the Hegelian dialectic generally and especially its
exposition in the Phänomenologie and Logik and also, lastly, the relation (to it) of the
modern critical movement.[42]
So powerful was modern German criticism’s preoccupation with the past — so

completely was its development entangled with the subject-matter — that here prevailed
a completely uncritical attitude to the method of criticising, together with a complete lack
of awareness about the apparently formal, but really vital question: how do we now stand
as regards the Hegelian dialectic? This lack of awareness about the relationship of
modern criticism to the Hegelian philosophy as a whole and especially to the Hegelian
dialectic has been so great that critics like Strauss and Bruno Bauer still remain within
the confines of the Hegelian logic; the former completely so and the latter at least
implicitly so in his Synoptiker (where, in opposition to Strauss, he replaces the substance
of “abstract nature” by the “self-consciousness” of abstract man), and even in Das
entdeckte Christenthum. Thus in Das entdeckte Christenthum, for example, you get:
“As though in positing the world, self-consciousness does not posit that which is different
[from itself] and in what it is creating it does not create itself, since it in turn annuls the
difference between what it has created and itself, since it itself has being only in creating
and in the movement — as though its purpose were not this movement?” etc.; or again:
“They” (the French materialists) “have not yet been able to see that it is only as the
movement of self-consciousness that the movement of the universe has actually come to
be for itself, and achieved unity with itself.” [Pp. 113, 114-15.]
Such expressions do not even show any verbal divergence from the Hegelian approach,
but on the contrary repeat it word for word.
How little consciousness there was in relation to the Hegelian dialectic during the act of
criticism (Bauer, the Synoptiker), and how little this consciousness came into being even
after the act of material criticism, is proved by Bauer when, in his Die gute Sache der
Freiheit, he dismisses the brash question put by Herr Gruppe — “What about logic
now?” — by referring him to future critics.[43]
But even now — now that Feuerbach both in his “Thesen” in the Anekdota and, in detail,
in the Philosophie der Zukunft has in principle overthrown the old dialectic and
philosophy; now that that school of criticism, on the other hand, which was incapable of
accomplishing this, has all the same seen it accomplished and has proclaimed itself pure,
resolute, absolute criticism that has come into the clear with itself; now that this criticism,
in its spiritual pride, has reduced the whole process of history to the relation between the

rest of the world and itself (the rest of the world, in contrast to itself, falling under the
category of “the masses”) and dissolved all dogmatic antitheses into the single dogmatic
antithesis of its own cleverness and the stupidity of the world — the antithesis of the
critical Christ and Mankind, the “rabble”; now that daily and hourly it has demonstrated
its own excellence against the dullness of the masses; now, finally, that it has proclaimed
the critical Last Judgment in the shape of an announcement that the day is approaching
when the whole of decadent humanity will assemble before it and be sorted by it into
groups, each particular mob receiving its testimonium paupertatis; now that it has made
known in print its superiority to human feelings as well as its superiority to the world,
over which it sits enthroned in sublime solitude, only letting fall from time to time from
its sarcastic lips the ringing laughter of the Olympian Gods — even now, after all these
delightful antics of idealism (i.e., of Young Hegelianism) expiring in the guise of
criticism — even now it has not expressed the suspicion that the time was ripe for a
critical settling of accounts with the mother of Young Hegelianism — the Hegelian
dialectic — and even had nothing to say about its critical attitude towards the
Feuerbachian dialectic. This shows a completely uncritical attitude to itself.

Feuerbach is the only one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic
and who has made genuine discoveries in this field. He is in fact the true conqueror of the
old philosophy. The extent of his achievement, and the unpretentious simplicity with
which he, Feuerbach, gives it to the world, stand in striking contrast to the opposite
attitude (of the others).
Feuerbach’s great achievement is:
(1) The proof that philosophy is nothing else but religion expounded by thought, i.e.,
another form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence of man; hence
equally to be condemned;
(2) The establishment of true materialism and of real science, by making the social
relationship of “man to man” the basic negation of the negation, which claims to be the
absolute positive, positively based on itself.
Feuerbach explains the Hegelian dialectic (and thereby justifies starting out from the

positive facts which we know by the senses) as follows:
Hegel sets out from the estrangement of substance (in logic, from the infinite, abstractly
universal) — from the absolute and fixed abstraction; which means, put in a popular way,
that he sets out from religion and theology.
Secondly, he annuls the infinite, and posits the actual, sensuous, real, finite, particular
(philosophy, annulment of religion and theology).
Thirdly, he again annuls the positive and restores the abstraction, the infinite —
restoration of religion and theology.
Feuerbach thus conceives the negation of the negation only as a contradiction of
philosophy with itself — as the philosophy which affirms theology (the transcendent,
etc.) after having denied it, and which it therefore affirms in opposition to itself. .
The positive position or self-affirmation and self-confirmation contained in the negation
of the negation is taken to be a position which is not yet sure of itself, which is therefore
burdened with its opposite, which is doubtful of itself and therefore in need of proof, and
which, therefore, is not a position demonstrating itself by its existence — not an
acknowledged position; hence it is directly and immediately confronted by the position of
sense-certainty based on itself. [Feuerbach also defines the negation of the negation, the
definite concept, as thinking surpassing itself in thinking and as thinking wanting to be
directly awareness, nature, reality. — Note by Marx [44]]
But because Hegel has conceived the negation of the negation, from the point of view of
the positive relation inherent in it, as the true and only positive, and from the point of
view of the negative relation inherent in it as the only true act and spontaneous activity of
all being, he has only found the abstract, logical, speculative expression for the
movement of history, which is not yet the real history of man as a given subject, but only
the act of creation, the history of the origin of man.
We shall explain both the abstract form of this process and the difference between this
process as it is in Hegel in contrast to modern criticism, in contrast to the same process in
Feuerbach’s Wesen des Christenthums, or rather the critical form of this in Hegel still
uncritical process.

Let us take a look at the Hegelian system. One must begin with Hegel’s Phänomenologie,
the true point of origin and the secret of the Hegelian philosophy.
Phenomenology.
A. Self-consciousness.
I. Consciousness. (a) Certainty at the level of sense-experience; or the “this” and
“meaning”. (b) Perception, or the thing with its properties, and deception. (c) Force and
understanding, appearance and the supersensible world.
II. Self-consciousness. The truth of certainty of self. (a) Independence and dependence of
self-consciousness; lord-ship and bondage. (b) Freedom of self-consciousness. Stoicism,
scepticism, the unhappy consciousness.
III. Reason. Reason’s certainty and reason’s truth. (a) Observation as a process of reason.
Observation of nature and of self-consciousness. (b) Realisation of consciousness through
its own activity. Pleasure and necessity. The law of the heart and the insanity of
self-conceit. Virtue and the course of the world. (c) The individuality which is real in and
for itself. The spiritual animal kingdom and the deception or the real fact. Reason as
lawgiver. Reason which tests laws.
B. Mind.
I. True mind, ethics. II. Mind in self-estrangement, culture. III. Mind certain of itself,
morality.
C. Religion. Natural religion; religion of art; revealed religion.
D. Absolute knowledge.
Hegel’s Encyklopädie, beginning as it does with logic, with pure speculative thought, and
ending with absolute knowledge — with the self-conscious, self-comprehending
philosophic or absolute (i.e., superhuman) abstract mind — is in its entirety nothing but
the display, the self-objectification, of the essence of the philosophic mind, and the
philosophic mind is nothing but the estranged mind of the world thinking within its
self-estrangement — i.e., comprehending itself abstractly.
Logic — mind’s coin of the realm, the speculative or mental value of man and nature —
its essence which has grown totally indifferent to all real determinateness, and hence
unreal — is alienated thinking, and therefore thinking which abstracts from nature and

from real man: abstract thinking.
Then: The externality of this abstract thinking nature, as it is for this abstract thinking.
Nature is external to it — its self-loss; and it apprehends nature also in an external
fashion, as alienated abstract thinking. Finally, mind, this thinking returning home to its
own point of origin — the thinking which as the anthropological, phenomenological,
psychological, ethical, artistic and religious mind is not valid for itself, until ultimately it
finds itself, and affirms itself, as absolute knowledge and hence absolute, i.e., abstract,
mind, thus receiving its conscious embodiment in the mode of existence corresponding to
it. For its real mode of existence is abstraction.

There is a double error in Hegel.
The first emerges most clearly in the Phänomenologie, the birth-place of the Hegelian
philosophy. When, for instance, wealth, state-power, etc., are understood by Hegel as
entities estranged from the human being, this only happens in their form as thoughts
They are thought-entities, and therefore merely an estrangement of pure, i.e., abstract,
philosophical thinking. The whole process therefore ends with absolute knowledge. It is
precisely abstract thought from which these objects are estranged and which they
confront with their presumption of reality. The philosopher — who is himself an abstract
form of estranged man — takes himself as the criterion of the estranged world. The
whole history of the alienation process and the whole process of the retraction of the
alienation is therefore nothing but the history of the production of abstract (i.e., absolute)
[45] thought — of logical, speculative thought. The estrangement, which therefore forms
the real interest of the transcendence of this alienation, is the opposition of in itself and
for itself, of consciousness and self-consciousness, of object and subject — that is to say,
it is the opposition between abstract thinking and sensuous reality or real sensuousness
within thought itself. All other oppositions and movements of these oppositions are but
the semblance, the cloak, the exoteric shape of these oppositions which alone matter, and
which constitute the meaning of these other, profane oppositions. It is not the fact that the
human being objectifies himself inhumanly, in opposition to himself, but the fact that he
objectifies himself in distinction from and in opposition to abstract thinking, that

constitutes the posited essence of the estrangement and the thing to be superseded.
The appropriation of man’s essential powers, which have become objects — indeed, alien
objects — is thus in the first place only an appropriation occurring in consciousness, in
pure thought, i.e., in abstraction: it is the appropriation of these objects as thoughts and
as movement of thought. Consequently, despite its thoroughly negative and critical
appearance and despite the genuine criticism contained in it, which often anticipates far
later development, there is already latent in the Phänomenologie as a germ, a potentiality,
a secret, the uncritical positivism and the equally uncritical idealism of Hegel’s later
works — that philosophic dissolution and restoration of the existing empirical world.
In the second place: the vindication of the objective world for man — for example, the
realisation that sensuous consciousness is not an abstractly sensuous consciousness but a
humanly sensuous consciousness, that religion, wealth, etc., are but the estranged world
of human objectification, of man’s essential powers put to work and that they are
therefore but the path to the true human world — this appropriation or the insight into
this process appears in Hegel therefore in this form, that sense, religion, state power, etc.,
are spiritual entities; for only mind is the true essence of man, and the true form of mind
is thinking mind, theological, speculative mind.
The human character of nature and of the nature created by history — man’s products —
appears in the form that they are products of abstract mind and as such, therefore, phases
of mind — thought-entities. The Phänomenologie is, therefore, a hidden, mystifying and
still uncertain criticism; but inasmuch as it depicts man’s estrangement, even though man
appears only as mind, there lie concealed in it all the elements of criticism, already
prepared and elaborated in a manner often rising far above the Hegelian standpoint. The
“unhappy consciousness”, the “honest consciousness”, the struggle of the “noble and
base consciousness”, etc., etc. — these separate sections contain, but still in an estranged
form, the critical elements of whole spheres such as religion, the state, civil life, etc. Just
as entities, objects, appear as thought-entities, so the subject is always consciousness or
self-consciousness; or rather the object appears only as abstract consciousness, man only
as self-consciousness: the distinct forms of estrangement which make their appearance
are, therefore, only various forms of consciousness and self-consciousness. Just as in

itself abstract consciousness (the form in which the object is conceived) is merely a
moment of distinction of self-consciousness, what appears as the result of the movement
is the identity of self-consciousness with consciousness — absolute knowledge — the
movement of abstract thought no longer directed outwards but proceeding now only
within its own self: that is to say, the dialectic of pure thought is the result.

[46] The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phänomenologie and of its final outcome,
the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is thus first that Hegel
conceives the self-creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the
object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the
essence of labour and comprehends objective man — true, because real man — as the
outcome of man’s own labour. The real, active orientation of man to himself as a
species-being, or his manifestation as a real species-being (i.e., as a human being), is only
possible if he really brings out all his species-powers — something which in turn is only
possible through the cooperative action of all of mankind, only as the result of history —
and treats these, — powers as objects: and this, to begin with, is again only possible in
the form of estrangement.
We shall now demonstrate in detail Hegel’s one-sidedness — and limitations as they are
displayed in the final chapter of the Phänomenologie, “Absolute Knowledge” — a
chapter which contains the condensed spirit of the Phänomenologie, the relationship of
the Phänomenologie to speculative dialectic, and also Hegel’s consciousness concerning
both and their relationship to one another.
Let us provisionally say just this much in advance: Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern
political economy. [47] He grasps labour as the essence of man — as man’s essence
which stands the test: he sees only the positive, not the negative side of labour. Labour is
man’s coming-to-be for himself within alienation, or as alienated man. The only labour
which Hegel knows and recognises is abstractly mental labour. Therefore, that which
constitutes the essence of philosophy — the alienation of man who knows himself, or
alienated science thinking itself - Hegel grasps as its essence; and in contradistinction to
previous philosophy he is therefore able to combine its separate aspects, and to present

his philosophy as the philosophy. What the other philosophers did — that they grasped
separate phases of nature and of human life as phases of self-consciousness, namely, of
human life as phases of self-consciousness, namely, of abstract self-consciousness — is
known to Hegel as the doings of philosophy. Hence his science is absolute.

Let us now turn to our subject.
“Absolute Knowledge”. The last chapter of the “Phänomenologie”.
The main point is that the object of consciousness is nothing else but self-consciousness,
or that the object is only objectified self-consciousness — self-consciousness as object.
(Positing of man = self-consciousness).
The issue, therefore, is to surmount the object of consciousness. Objectivity as such is
regarded as an estranged human relationship which does not correspond to the essence of
man, to self-consciousness. The reappropriation of the objective essence of man,
produced within the orbit of estrangement as something alien, therefore denotes not only
the annulment of estrangement, but of objectivity as well. Man, that is to say, is regarded
as a non-objective, spiritual being.
The movement of surmounting the object of consciousness is now described by Hegel in
the following way:
The object reveals itself not merely as returning into the self — this is — according to
Hegel the one-sided way of apprehending this movement, the grasping of only one side.
Man is equated with self. The self, however, is only the abstractly conceived man — man
created by abstraction. Man is selfish. His eye, his ear, etc., are selfish. In him every one
of his essential powers has the quality of selfhood. But it is quite false to say on that
account “self-consciousness has eyes, ears, essential powers”. Self-consciousness is rather
a quality of self-consciousness.
The self-abstracted entity, fixed for itself, is man as abstract egoist — egoism raised in its
pure abstraction to the level of thought. (We shall return to this point later.)
For Hegel the human being — man — equals self-consciousness. All estrangement of the
human being is therefore nothing but estrangement of self-consciousness. The
estrangement of self-consciousness is not regarded as an expression — reflected in the

realm of knowledge and thought — of the real estrangement of the human being. Instead,
the actual estrangement — that which appears real — is according to its inner-most,
hidden nature (which is only brought to light by philosophy) nothing but the
manifestation of the estrangement of the real human essence, of self-consciousness. The
science which comprehends this is therefore called phenomenology. All reappropriation
of the estranged objective essence appears therefore, as incorporation into
self-consciousness: The man who takes hold of his essential being is merely the
self-consciousness which takes hold of objective essences. Return of the object into the
self is therefore the reappropriation of the object.
Expressed in all its aspects, the surmounting of the object of consciousness means:
(1) That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as something vanishing.
(2) That it is the alienation of self-consciousness which posits thinghood.[48]
(3) That this alienation has, not merely a negative but a positive significance
(4) That it has this meaning not merely for us or intrinsically, but for self-consciousness
itself.
(5) For self-consciousness, the negative of the object, or its annulling of itself, has
positive significance — or it knows this futility of the object — because of the fact that it
alienates itself, for in this alienation it posits itself as object, or, for the sake of the
indivisible unity of being-for-self, posits the object as itself.
(6) On the other hand, this contains likewise the other moment, that self-consciousness
has also just as much superseded this alienation and objectivity and resumed them into
itself, being thus at home in its other-being as such.
(7) This is the movement of consciousness and this is therefore the totality of its
moments.
(8) Consciousness must similarly be related to the object in the totality of its
determinations and have comprehended it in terms of each of them. This totality of its
determinations makes the object intrinsically a spiritual being; and it becomes so in truth
for consciousness through the apprehending of each one of the determinations as self, or
through what was called above the spiritual attitude to them. [49]

As to (1): That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as something vanishing
— this is the above-mentioned return of the object into the self.
As to (2): The alienation of self-consciousness posits thinghood. Because man equals
self-consciousness, his alienated, objective essence, or thinghood, equals alienated
self-consciousness, and thinghood is thus posited through this alienation (thinghood being
that which is an object for man and an object for him is really only that which is to him
an essential object, therefore his objective essence. And since it is not real man, nor
therefore nature — man being human nature — who as such is made the subject, but
only the abstraction of man, self-consciousness, so thinghood cannot be anything but
alienated self-consciousness). It is only to be expected that a living, natural being
equipped and endowed with objective (i.e., material) essential powers should of his
essence have real natural objects; and that his self-alienation should lead to the positing
of a real, objective world, but within the framework of externality, and, therefore, an
overwhelming world not belonging to his own essential being. There is nothing
incomprehensible or mysterious in this. It would be mysterious, rather, if it were
otherwise. But it is equally clear that a self-consciousness by its alienation can posit only
thinghood, i.e., only an abstract thing, a thing of abstraction and not a real thing. [50] It is
clear, further, that thinghood is therefore utterly without any independence, any
essentiality vis-á-vis self-consciousness; that on the contrary it is a mere creature —
something posited by self-consciousness. And what is posited, instead of confirming
itself, is but confirmation of the act of positing which for a moment fixes its energy as the
product, and gives it the semblance — but only for a moment — of an independent, real
substance.
Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, man
exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, posits his real, objective essential powers
as alien objects by his externalisation, it is not the act of positing which is the subject in
this process: it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action, therefore,
must also be something objective. An objective being acts objectively, and he would not
act objectively if the objective did not reside in the very nature of his being. He only
creates or posits objects, because he is posited by objects — because at bottom he is

nature. In the act of positing, therefore, this objective being does not fall from his state of
“pure activity” into a creating of the object; on the contrary, his objective product only
confirms his objective activity, his activity as the activity of an objective, natural being.
Here we see how consistent naturalism or humanism is distinct from both idealism and
materialism, and constitutes at the same time the unifying truth of both. We see also how
only naturalism is capable of comprehending the action of world history.
<Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on
the one hand endowed with natural powers, vital powers — he is an active natural being.
These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities — as instincts. On the other hand, as
a natural, corporeal, sensuous objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited
creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his instincts exist outside
him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects that he needs —
essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential
powers. To say that man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being full of
natural vigour is to say that he has real, sensuous objects as the object of his being or of
his life, or that he can only express his life in real, sensuous objects. To be objective,
natural and sensuous, and at the same time to have object, nature and sense outside
oneself, or oneself to be object, nature and sense for a third party, is one and the same
thing.>
Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object outside
itself, in order to satisfy itself, to be stilled. Hunger is an acknowledged need of my body
for an object existing outside it, indispensable to its integration and to the expression of
its essential being. The sun is the object of the plant — an indispensable object to it,
confirming its life — just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the
life-awakening power of the sun, of the sun’s objective essential power.
A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being, and plays no
part in the system of nature. A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective
being. A being which is not itself an object for some third being has no being for its
object; i.e., it is not objectively related. Its being is not objective.
A non-objective being is a non-being.

Suppose a being which is neither an object itself, nor has an object. Such a being, in the
first place, would be the unique being: there would exist no being outside it — it would
exist solitary and alone. For as soon as there are objects outside me, as soon as I am not
alone, I am another — another reality than the object outside me. For this third object I
am thus a different reality than itself; that is, I am its object. Thus, to suppose a being
which is not the object of another being is to presuppose that no objective being exists.
As soon as I have an object, this object has me for an object. But a non-objective being is
an unreal, non-sensuous thing — a product of mere thought (i.e., of mere imagination) —
an abstraction. To be sensuous, that is, to be really existing, means to be an object of
sense, to be a sensuous object, to have sensuous objects outside oneself — objects of
one’s sensuousness. To be sensuous is to suffer.
Man as an objective, sensuous being is therefore a suffering being — and because he
feels that he suffers, a passionate being. Passion is the essential power of man
energetically bent on its object.
<But man is not merely a natural being: he is a human natural being. That is to say, he is
a being for himself. Therefore he is a species-being, and has to confirm and manifest
himself as such both in his being and in his knowing. Therefore, human objects are not
natural objects as they immediately present themselves, and neither is human sense as it
immediately is — as it is objectively — human sensibility, human objectivity is directly
given in a form adequate to the human being.>
And as everything natural has to come into being, man too has his act of origin — history
— which, however, is for him a known history, and hence as an act of origin it is a
conscious self-transcending act of origin. History is the true natural history of man (on
which more later).
Thirdly, because this posting of thinghood is itself only an illusion, an act contradicting
the nature of pure activity, it has to be cancelled again and thinghood denied.
Re 3, 4, 5 and 6. (3) This externalisation of consciousness has not merely a negative but a
positive significance, and (4) it has this meaning not merely for us or intrinsically, but for
consciousness itself.
(5) For consciousness the negative of the object, its annulling of itself, has positive

significance — i.e., consciousness knows this nullity of the object — because it alienates
itself; for, in this alienation it knows itself as object, or, for the sake of the indivisible
unity of being-for-itself, the object as itself.
(6) On the other hand, there is also this other moment in the process, that consciousness
has also just as much superseded this alienation and objectivity and resumed them into
itself, being thus at home in its other-being as such.

As we have already seen, the appropriation of what is estranged and objective, or the
annulling of objectivity in the form of estrangement (which has to advance from
indifferent strangeness to real, antagonistic estrangement), means likewise or even
primarily for Hegel that it is objectivity which is to be annulled, because it is not the
determinate character of the object, but rather its objective character that is offensive and
constitutes estrangement for self-consciousness. The object is therefore something
negative, self-annulling — a nullity. This nullity of the object has not only a negative but
a positive meaning for consciousness, since this nullity of the object is precisely the
self-confirmation of the non-objectivity, of the abstraction of itself. For consciousness
itself the nullity of the object has a positive meaning because it knows this nullity, the
objective being, as its self-alienation; because it knows that it exists only as a result of its
own self-alienation
The way in which consciousness is, and in which something is for it, is knowing.
Knowing is its sole act. Something therefore comes to be for consciousness insofar as the
latter knows this something. Knowing is its sole objective relation.
It [consciousness] then knows the nullity of the object (i.e., knows the non-existence of
the distinction between the object and itself, the non-existence of the object for it)
because it knows the object as its self-alienation; that is knows itself — knows knowing
as object — because the object is only he semblance of an object, a piece of
mystification, which in its essence, however, is nothing else but knowing itself, which
has confronted itself with itself and hence has confronted itself with a nullity — a
something which has no objectivity outside the knowing. Or: knowing knows that in
relating itself to an object it is only outside itself — that it only externalises itself; that it

itself only appears to itself as an object — or that that which appears to it as an object is
only itself.
On the other hand, says Hegel, there is here at the same time this other moment, that
consciousness has just as much annulled and reabsorbed this externalisation and
objectivity, being thus at home in its other-being as such.

In this discussion all the illusions of speculation are brought together.
First of all: consciousness, self-consciousness, is at home in its other-being as such. It is
therefore — or if we here abstract from the Hegelian abstraction and (put the
self-consciousness of man instead of self-consciousness) it is at home in its other being
as such. This implies, for one thing, that consciousness (knowing as knowing, thinking as
thinking) pretends to be directly the other of itself — to be the world of sense, the real
world, life — thought surpassing itself in thought (Feuerbach)[51]. This aspect is
contained herein, inasmuch as consciousness as mere consciousness takes offence not at
estranged objectivity, but at objectivity as such.
Secondly, this implies that self-conscious man, insofar as he has recognised and
superseded the spiritual world (or his world’s spiritual, general mode of being) as
self-alienation, nevertheless again confirms it in this alienated shape and passes it off as
his true mode of being — re-establishes it, and pretends to be at home in his other-being
as such. Thus, for instance, after superseding religion, after recognising religion to be a
product of self-alienation he yet finds confirmation of himself in religion as religion.
Here is the root of Hegel’s false positivism, or of his merely apparent criticism: this is
what Feuerbach designated as the positing, negating and re-establishing of religion or
theology — but it has to be expressed in more general terms. Thus reason is at home in
unreason The man who has recognised that he is leading an alienated life in law, politics,
etc., is leading his true human life in this alienated life as such. Self-affirmation,
self-confirmation in contradiction with itself — in contradiction with both the knowledge
and the essential being of the object — is thus true knowledge and life.
There can therefore no longer be any question about an act of accommodation on Hegel’s
part vis-à-vis religion, the state, etc., since this lie is the lie of his principle.

If I know religion as alienated human self-consciousness, then what I know in it as
religion is not my self-consciousness, but my alienated self-consciousness confirmed in
it. I therefore know my self-consciousness that belongs to itself, to its very nature,
confirmed not in religion but rather in annihilated and superseded religion.
In Hegel, therefore, the negation of the negation is not the confirmation of the true
essence, effected precisely through negation of the pseudo-essence. With him the
negation the negation is the confirmation of the pseudo-essence, or of the self-estranged
essence in its denial; or it is the denial; or it is the denial of this pseudo-essence as an
objective being dwelling outside man and independent of him, and its transformation into
the subject.
A peculiar role, therefore, is played by the act of superseding in which denial and
preservation, i.e., affirmation, are bound together.
Thus, for example, in Hegel’s philosophy of law, civil law superseded equals morality,
morality superseded equals the family, the family superseded equals civil society, civil
society superseded equals the state, the state superseded equals world history. In the
actual world civil law, morality, the family, civil society, the state, etc., remain in
existence and being of man — which have no validity in isolation, but dissolve and
engender one another, etc. They have become moments of motion.
In their actual existence this mobile nature of theirs is hidden. It appears and is made
manifest only in thought, in philosophy. Hence my true religious existence is my
existence in the philosophy of religion; my true political existence is my existence in the
philosophy of law; my true natural existence, existence in the philosophy of nature; my
true artistic existence, existence in the philosophy of art; my true human existence, my
existence in philosophy. Likewise the true existence of religion, the state, nature, art, is
the philosophy of religion, of nature, of the state and of art. If, however, the philosophy of
religion, etc., is for me the sole true existence of religion then, too, it is only as a
philosopher of religion that I am truly religious, and so I deny real religious sentiment
and the really religious man. But at the same time I assert them, in part within my own
existence or within the alien existence which I oppose to them — for this is only their
philosophic expression-and in part I assert them in their distinct original shape, since for

me they represent merely the apparent other-being, allegories, forms of their own true
existence (i.e., of my philosophical existence) hidden under sensuous disguises.
In just the same way, quality superseded equals quantity, quantity superseded equals
measure, measure superseded equals essence, essence superseded equals appearance,
appearance superseded equals actuality, actuality superseded equals the concept, the
concept superseded equals objectivity, objectivity superseded equals the absolute idea,
the absolute idea superseded equals nature, nature superseded equals subjective mind,
subjective mind superseded equals ethical objective mind, ethical mind superseded
equals art, art superseded equals religion, religion superseded equals absolute
knowledge.[52]
On the one hand, this act of superseding is a transcending of a conceptual entity; thus,
private property as a concept is transcended in the concept of morality. And because
thought imagines itself to be directly the other of itself, to be sensuous reality — and
therefore takes its own action for sensuous, real action — this superseding in thought,
which leaves its object in existence in the real world, believes that it has really overcome
it. On the other hand, because the object has now become for it a moment of thought ,
thought takes it in its reality too to be self-confirmation of itself — of self-consciousness,
of abstraction.
From the one point of view the entity which Hegel supersedes in philosophy is therefore
not real religion, the real state, or real nature, but religion itself already as an object of
knowledge, i.e., dogmatics; the same with jurisprudence, political science and natural
science. From the one point of view, therefore, he stands in opposition both to the real
thing and to immediate, unphilosophic science or the unphilosophic conceptions of this
thing. He therefore contradicts their conventional conceptions.
On the other hand, the religious, etc., man can find in Hegel his final confirmation.

It is now time to formulate the positive aspects of the Hegelian dialectic within the realm
of estrangement.
(a) Supersession as an objective movement of retracting the alienation into self. This is
the insight, expressed within the estrangement, concerning the appropriation of the

objective essence through the supersession of its estrangement; it is the estranged insight
into the real objectification of man, into the real appropriation of his objective essence
through the annihilation of the estranged character of the objective world, through the
supersession of the objective world in its estranged mode of being. In the same way
atheism being the supersession of God, is the advent of theoretical humanism, and
communism, as the supersession of private property, is the vindication of real human life
as man’s possession and thus the advent of practical humanism, or atheism is humanism
mediated with itself through the supersession of religion, whilst communism is humanism
mediated with itself through the supersession of private property. Only through the
supersession of this mediation — which is itself, however, a necessary premise — does
positively self-deriving humanism, positive humanism, come into being.
But atheism and communism are no flight, no abstraction no loss of the objective world
created by man — of man’s essential powers born to the realm of objectivity; they are not
a returning in poverty to unnatural, primitive simplicity. On the contrary, they are but the
first real emergence, the actual realisation for man of man’s essence and of his essence as
something real.
Thus, by grasping the positive meaning of self-referred negation (although again in
estranged fashion) Hegel grasps man’s self-estrangement, the alienation of man’s
essence, man’s loss of objectivity and his loss of realness as self-discovery, manifestation
of his nature, objectification and realisation. <In short, within the sphere of abstraction,
Hegel conceives labour as man’s act of self-genesis — conceives man’s relation to
himself as an alien being and the manifestation of himself as an alien being to be the
emergence of species-consciousness and species-life.>
(b) However, apart from, or rather in consequence of, the referral already described, this
act appears in Hegel:
First as a merely formal, because abstract, act, because the human being itself is taken to
be only an abstract, thinking being, conceived merely as self-consciousness. And,
Secondly, because the exposition is formal and abstract, the supersession of the
alienation of becomes a confirmation of the alienation; or, for Hegel this movement of
self-genesis and self-objectification in the form of self-alienation and self-estrangement is

the absolute, and hence final, expression of human life — with itself as its aim, at peace
with itself, and in unity with its essence.
This movement, in its abstract form as dialectic, is therefore regarded as truly human life,
and because it is nevertheless an abstraction — an estrangement of human life — it is
regarded as a divine process, but as the divine process of man, a process traversed by
man’s abstract, pure, absolute essence that is distinct from himself.
Thirdly, this process must have a bearer, a subject. But the subject only comes into being
as a result. This result — the subject knowing itself as absolute self consciousness — is
therefore God, absolute Spirit, the self-knowing and self-manifesting idea. Real man and
real nature become mere predicates — symbols of this hidden, unreal man and of this
unreal nature. Subject and predicate are therefore related to each other in absolute
reversals mystical subject-object or a subjectivity reaching beyond the object — absolute
subject as a process, as subject alienating itself and returning from alienation into itself,
but at the same time retracting this alienation into itself, and the subject as this process; a
pure, incessant revolving within itself.
First. Formal and abstract conception of man’s act of self-creation or
self-objectification.
Hegel having posited man as equivalent to self-consciousness, the estranged object — the
estranged essential reality of man — is nothing but consciousness the thought of
estrangement merely — estrangement’s abstract and therefore empty and unreal
expression, negation. The supersession of the alienation is therefore likewise nothing but
an abstract, empty supersession of that empty abstraction — the negation of the negation.
The rich, living, sensuous, concrete activity of self-objectification is therefore reduced to
its mere abstraction, absolute negativity — an abstraction which is again fixed as such
and considered as an independent activity — as sheer activity. Because this so-called
negativity is nothing but the abstract, empty form of that real living act, its content can in
consequence be merely a formal content produced by abstraction from all content. As a
result therefore one gets general, abstract forms of abstraction pertaining to every content
and on that account indifferent to, and, consequently, valid for, all content — the
thought-forms or logical categories torn from real mind and from real nature. (We shall

unfold the logical content of absolute negativity further on.)
Hegel’s positive achievement here, in his speculative logic, is that the definite concepts,
the universal fixed thought-forms in their independence vis-á-vis nature and mind are a
necessary result of the general estrangement of the human being and therefore also of a
human thought, and that Hegel has therefore brought these together and presented them
as moments of the abstraction-process. For example, superseded being is essence,
superseded essence is concept, the concept superseded is absolute idea. But what, then,
is the absolute idea? It supersedes its own self again, if it does not want to perform once
more from the beginning the whole act of abstraction, and to satisfy itself with being a
totality of abstractions or the self-comprehending abstraction. But abstraction
comprehending itself as abstraction knows itself to be nothing: it must abandon itself —
abandon abstraction — and so it arrives at an entity which is its exact opposite — at
nature. Thus, the entire logic is the demonstration that abstract thought is nothing in
itself; that the absolute idea is nothing for itself; that only nature is something.
The absolute idea, the abstract idea, which “considered with regard to its unity with itself
is intuiting (Logic § 244), and which (loc. cit.) “in its own absolute truth resolves to let
the moment of its particularity or of initial characterisation and other-being, the
immediate idea, as its reflection, go forth freely from itself as nature” (loc. cit.),
this whole idea which behaves in such a strange and bizarre way, and which has given the
Hegelians such terrible headaches, is from beginning to end nothing else but abstraction
(i.e., the abstract thinker), which, made wise by experience and enlightened concerning
its truth, resolves under various (false and themselves still abstract) conditions to
abandon itself and to replace its self-absorption, nothingness, generality and
indeterminateness by its other-being, the particular, and the determinate; resolves to let
nature, which it held hidden in itself only as an abstraction, as a thought-entity, go forth
freely from itself; that is to say, this idea resolves to forsake abstraction and to have a
look at nature free of abstraction. The abstract idea, which without mediation becomes
intuiting, is indeed nothing else but abstract thinking that gives itself up and resolves on
intuition. This entire transition from logic to natural philosophy is nothing else but the
transition — so difficult to effect for the abstract thinker, who therefore describes it such

a far-fetched way — from abstracting to intuiting. The mystical feeling which drives the
philosopher forward from abstract thinking to intuiting is boredom — the longing for
content.
The man estranged from himself is also the thinker estranged from his essence — that is,
from the natural and human essence. His thoughts are therefore fixed mental forms
dwelling outside nature and man. Hegel has locked up all these fixed mental forms
together in his logic, interpreting each of them. as negation — that is, as an alienation of
human thought — and then as negation of the negation — that is, as a superseding of this
alienation, as a real expression of human thought. But as this still takes place within the
confines of the estrangement, this negation of the negation is in part the restoring of these
fixed forms in their estrangement; in part a stopping at the last act — the act of
self-reference in alienation — as the true mode of being of these fixed mental forms;
[This means that what Hegel does is to put in place of these fixed abstractions the act of abstraction
which revolves in its own circle. We must therefore give him the credit for having indicated the source
of all these inappropriate thoughts which originally appertained to particular philosophers; for having
brought them together; and for having created the entire compass of abstraction as the object of
criticism, instead of some specific abstraction.) (Why Hegel separates thought from the subject we shall
see later; at this stage it is already clear, however, that when man is not, his characteristic expression
cannot be human either, and so neither could thought be grasped as an expression of man as a human
and natural subject endowed with eyes, ears, etc., and living in society, in the world, and in nature.]
and in part, to the extent that this abstraction apprehends itself and experiences an infinite
weariness with itself, there makes its appearance in Hegel, in the form of the resolution to
recognise nature as the essential being and to go over to intuition, the abandonment of
abstract thought — the abandonment of thought revolving solely within the orbit of
thought, of thought sans eyes, sans teeth, sans ears, sans everything.)
But nature too, taken abstractly, for itself — nature fixed in isolation from man — is
nothing for man. It goes without saying that the abstract thinker who has committed
himself to intuiting, intuits nature abstractly. Just as nature lay enclosed in the thinker in
the form of the absolute idea, in the form of a thought-entity — in a shape which was
obscure and enigmatic even to him — so by letting it emerge from himself he has really

let emerge only this abstract nature, only nature as a thought-entity — but now with the
significance that it is the other-being of thought, that it is real, intuited nature-nature
distinguished from abstract thought. Or, to talk in human language, abstract thinker learns
in his intuition of nature that the entities which he thought to create from nothing, from
pure abstraction — the entities he believed he was producing in the divine dialectic as
pure products of the labour of thought, for ever shuttling back and forth in itself and
never looking outward into reality — are nothing else but abstractions from
characteristics of nature. To him, therefore, the whole of nature merely repeats the
logical abstractions in a sensuous, external form. He once more resolves nature into these
abstractions. Thus, his intuition of nature is only the act of confirming his abstraction
from the intuition of nature [Let us consider for a moment Hegel’s characteristics of
nature and the transition from nature to the mind. Nature has resulted as the idea in the
form of the other-being. Since the id ] — is only the conscious repetition by him of the
process of creating his abstraction. Thus, for example, time equals negativity referred to
itself (Hegel, Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. p. 238).
To the superseded becoming as being there corresponds, in natural form, superseded
movement as matter. Light is reflection-in-itself, the natural form. Body as moon and
comet is the natural form of the antithesis which according to logic is on the one side the
positive resting on itself and on the other side the negative resting on itself. The earth is
the natural form of the logical ground, as the negative unity of the antithesis, etc.
Nature as nature -that is to say, insofar as it is still sensuously distinguished from that
secret sense hidden within it — nature isolated, distinguished from these abstractions is
nothing — a nothing proving itself to be nothing — is devoid of sense, or has only the
sense of being an externality which has to be annulled.
“In the finite-teleological position is to be found the correct premise that nature does not
contain within itself the absolute purpose.” [§245].
Its purpose is the confirmation of abstraction.
“Nature has shown itself to be the idea in the form of other-being. Since the idea is in this
form the negative of itself or external to itself, nature is not just relatively external
vis-á-vis this idea, but externality constitutes the form in which it exists as nature.” [§

247].
Externality here is not to be understood as the world of sense which manifests itself and is
accessible to the light, to the man endowed with senses. It is to be taken here in the sense
of alienation, of a mistake, a defect, which ought not to be. For what is true is still the
idea. Nature is only the form of the idea’s other-being. And since abstract thought is the
essence, that which is external to it is by its essence something merely external. The
abstract thinker recognises at the same time that sensuousness — externality in contrast to
thought shuttling back and forth within itself — is the essence of nature. But he expresses
this contrast in such a way as to make this externality of nature, its contrast to thought, its
defect, so that inasmuch as it is distinguished from abstraction, nature is something
defective.
An entity which is defective not merely for me or in my eyes but in itself — intrinsically
— has something outside itself which it lacks. That is, its essence is different from it
itself. Nature has therefore to supersede itself for the abstract thinker, for it is already
posited by him as a potentially superseded being.
“For us, mind has nature for its premise, being nature’s truth and for that reason its
absolute prius. In this truth nature has vanished, and mind has resulted as the idea arrived
at being-for-itself, the object of which, as well as the subject, is the concept. This identity
is absolute negativity, for whereas in nature the concept has its perfect external
objectivity, this its alienation has been superseded, and in this alienation the concept has
become identical with itself. But it is this identity therefore, only in being a return out of
nature.” [§ 381].
“As the abstract idea, revelation is unmediated transition to, the coming-to-be of, nature;
as the revelation of the mind, which is free, it is the positing of nature as the mind’s world
— a positing which, being reflection, is at the same time, a presupposing of the world as
independently existing nature. Revelation in conception is the creation of nature as the
mind’s being, in which the mind procures the affirmation and the truth of its freedom.”
“The absolute is mind. This is the highest definition of the absolute.” [§ 384.]